Bøger i I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History serien

In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the republican city-state of Florence--birthplace of the Renaissance--failed. In its place the Medici family created a principality, becoming first dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany. The Fruit of Liberty examines how this transition occurred from the perspective of the Florentine patricians who had dominated and controlled the republic. The book analyzes the long, slow social and cultural transformations that predated, accompanied, and facilitated the institutional shift from republic to principality, from citizen to subject. More than a chronological narrative, this analysis covers a wide range of contributing factors to this transition, from attitudes toward officeholding, clothing, the patronage of artists and architects to notions of self, family, and gender. Using a wide variety of sources including private letters, diaries, and art works, Nicholas Baker explores how the language, images, and values of the republic were reconceptualized to aid the shift from citizen to subject. He argues that the creation of Medici principality did not occur by a radical break with the past but with the adoption and adaptation of the political culture of Renaissance republicanism.

Founded in 1540, the Society of Jesus was instantly popular, attracting thousands of candidates in its first century. Camilla Russell looks to the lives and writings of early Jesuits to better understand the Society's appeal, how it worked, and the ideas that drove Christian thinkers and missionaries during the Renaissance and early modern period.

Revealing an Italian Renaissance beyond Michelangelo and the Medici, Sarah Gwyneth Ross recovers the experiences of everyday people who were inspired to pursue humanistic learning. Physicians were often the most avid professionals seeking to earn the respect of their betters, advance their families, and secure honorable remembrance after death.

In 1420, after more than one hundred years of the Avignon Exile and the Western Schism, the papal court returned to Rome, which had become depopulated, dangerous, and impoverished in the papacy's absence. Reviving the Eternal City examines the culture of Rome and the papal court during the first half of the fifteenth century. As Elizabeth McCahill explains, during these decades Rome and the Curia were caught between conflicting realities--between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of the city as a papal capital. Through the testimony of humanists' rhetorical texts and surviving archival materials, McCahill reconstructs the niche that scholars carved for themselves as they penned vivid descriptions of Rome and offered remedies for contemporary social, economic, religious, and political problems. In addition to analyzing the humanists' intellectual and professional program, McCahill investigates the different agendas that popes Martin V (1417-1431) and Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and their cardinals had for the post-Schism pontificate. Reviving the Eternal City illuminates an urban environment in transition and explores the ways in which curialists collaborated and competed to develop Rome's ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.

Roisin Cossar examines how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the Black Death. Despite reformers' desire for clerics to remain celibate, clerical households resembled those of the laity, and priests' lives included apprenticeships in youth, fatherhood in middle age, and reliance on their families in old age.

Dag Nikolaus Hasse shows how ideological and scientific motives led to the decline of Arabic traditions in European culture. The Renaissance was a turning point: on the one hand, Arabic scientific traditions reached their peak of influence in Europe; on the other, during this period the West began to forget, or suppress, its debt to Arabic culture.

Lorenz Boeninger tells the story of Niccolo di Lorenzo della Magna, a major printer of Renaissance Italy. Niccolo's hitherto mysterious life and career provide unparalleled insight into the business of printing in its earliest years, illuminating the economic, legal, and intellectual forces that surrounded the publication and dissemination of texts.

Guido Ruggiero brings readers back to Renaissance Florence, capturing how the Decameron sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece of love, sex, loyalty, and betrayal resonated amid the Black Death and the era's convulsive political change, reimagining truth and virtue in a moment both desperate and full of potential.

The Renaissance was also the beginning of the Age of Empires, yet the Grand Duchy of Tuscany failed to secure overseas colonies. How did Tuscany retain its place in European affairs and intellectual life? Brian Brege explores the shrewd diplomatic moves and domestic investments that safeguarded the duchy's wealth and influence amid globalization.

Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance poets and philologists, not scientists, rescued Lucretius and his atomism theory. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met transformative ideas.

Using four notorious moments in the life of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, Valeria Finucci explores changing early modern concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and aging. She deftly marries salacious tales with historical analysis to tell a broader story of Italian Renaissance cultural adjustments and obsessions.

Cosimo dei Medici stabilized ducal finances, secured his borders, doubled his territory, attracted scholars and artists to his court, academy, and universities, and dissipated fractious Florentine politics. These triumphs were far from a foregone conclusion, as Gregory Murry shows in this study of how Cosimo crafted his image as a sacral monarch.

Dispelling the myth that Florentine politics offered only negative lessons, Mark Jurdjevic shows that significant aspects of Machiavelli's political thought were inspired by his native city. Machiavelli's contempt for Florence's shortcomings was a direct function of his considerable estimation of the city's unrealized political potential.

In explaining an improbable liaison and its consequences, A Mattress Maker's Daughter explores changing concepts of love and romance, new standards of public and private conduct, and emerging attitudes toward property and legitimacy just as the age of Renaissance humanism gives way to the Counter Reformation and Early Modern Europe.

The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. The recent discovery of a large number of private account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period. This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and opens a new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. They also allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.

John Christopoulos provides a comprehensive account of abortion in early modern Italy. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives, he explores the meanings of a practice that was officially banned yet widely practiced and generally tolerated, demonstrating that Italy was hardly a haven for Catholic anti-abortion absolutism.

Italian sermons tell a story of the Reformation that credits preachers with using the pulpit, pen, and printing press to keep Italy Catholic when the region’s violent religious wars made the future uncertain, and with fashioning a post-Reformation Catholicism that would survive the competition and religious choice of their own time and ours.

Renaissance debates about politics and gender led to pioneering forms of poor relief, devised to help women get a start in life. These included orphanages for illegitimate children and forced labor in workhouses, but also women's shelters and early forms of maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and credit union savings plans.

The Duke and the Stars explores science and medicine as studied and practiced in fifteenth-century Italy, including how astrology was taught in relation to astronomy. It illustrates how the "e;predictive art"e; of astrology was often a critical, secretive source of information for Italian Renaissance rulers, particularly in times of crisis.

In 1482 Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over 100 folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse interleaved with lavishly engraved maps. Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography.

Leonardo Bruni is widely recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. Gary Ianziti undertakes a systematic work-by-work investigation of the full range of Bruni's output in history and biography, and assesses in detail the impact of the Greek historians on humanist methods of historical writing.

This innovative microhistory of a fascinating yet neglected city shows how its loyalty to Venice was tested by military attack, economic downturn, and demographic collapse. Despite these trials, Brescia experienced cultural revival and political transformation, which Bowd uses to explain state formation in a powerful region of Renaissance Italy.

One of the leading humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) has been praised as a brilliant debunker of medieval scholastic philosophy. In this book Lodi Nauta seeks a more balanced assessment, presenting us with the first comprehensive analysis of the humanist's attempt at radical reform of Aristotelian scholasticism.

Coluccio Salutati was chancellor of the Florentine Republic and leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. He was among the first to apply his classical learning to political theory and his rhetorical skills to the defense of liberty. This volume contains a new English version of his political writings.

Salomone da Sesso was a virtuoso goldsmith in Renaissance Italy. Brought down by a sex scandal, he saved his skin by converting to Catholicism. Tamar Herzig explores Salamone's world-his Jewish upbringing, his craft and patrons, and homosexuality. In his struggle for rehabilitation, we see how precarious and contested was the meaning of conversion.

In Renaissance Italy women from all walks of life played a central role in health care and the early development of medical science. Observing that the frontlines of care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Sharon Strocchia encourages us to rethink women's place in the history of medicine.

Giannozzo Manetti was one of the most remarkable figures of the Italian Renaissance, though today his works are unfamiliar in English. In this authoritative biography, the first ever in English, David Marsh guides readers through the vast range of Manetti's writings, which epitomized the new humanist scholarship of the Quattrocento.

Brown demonstrates how Florentine thinkers used Lucretius-earlier and more widely than has been supposed-to provide a radical critique of prevailing orthodoxies. She enhances our understanding of the "revolution" in sixteenth-century political thinking and our definition of the Renaissance within newly discovered worlds and new social networks.

Unn Falkeid considers the work of six fourteenth-century writers who waged literary war against the Avignon papacy's increasing claims of supremacy over secular rulers-a conflict that engaged contemporary critics from every corner of Europe. She illuminates arguments put forth by Dante, Petrarch, William of Ockham, Catherine of Siena, and others.

In 1499, Milan was an independent state with a stable government. But over the next thirty years, it descended into chaos amid the Italian Wars. John Gagne details Milan's social and political breakdown. The Renaissance may have been the cradle of the modern nation-state, but it was also a time when sophisticated sovereigns collapsed.